Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) has had a rough few months. After telling voters that she would not move to redraw the Commonwealth’s congressional district lines, she won a decisive victory — then immediately went back on her word. The very first bill she signed into law as chief executive was to advance her party’s unconstitutional gerrymandering referendum.
The ensuing battle resulted in a lopsided and costly propaganda campaign, followed by a strikingly narrow and pyrrhic victory that was promptly and properly invalidated as illegally administered by the state’s high court. This was precisely what her own lawyers had reportedly warned could happen, but she was bullied by other Richmond Democrats into proceeding with their partisan misadventure anyway. Meanwhile, Spanberger’s image as a centrist has been torn to shreds, as voters have soured on her job performance in record time.
She’s now attempting a reset. Spanberger has vetoed a slew of bills that have emerged from the Democrat-controlled legislature, enraging some of her ostensible allies. The budget process, which is fully controlled by her party, is languishing in dysfunction. She’s rejected some Democrats’ insane, retaliatory scheme to unseat the entire Virginia Supreme Court, fueling rumors from intra-party detractors that she’s plotting to launch primary challenges against lawmakers she sees as thorns in her side (her team has denied this). As for Democrats’ failed redistricting fixation, Spanberger seems eager to move on. “Donald Trump and Republicans started this redistricting war, and we’ve made clear as Democrats that we’re going to finish it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) thundered, not long ago. This was part of his “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” approach, which he indignantly defended even in the immediate aftermath of a third assassination attempt against President Donald Trump.
Claiming that Republicans “started the redistricting war” is highly disputable, at best. But Democrats have certainly not managed to “finish it.” Having already maxed out their gerrymandering manipulations in many of the states they control, Democrats already had relatively limited options to combat GOP efforts across the country — even before the illegal Virginia gambit imploded. Their disadvantage has now deepened after the Supreme Court effectively struck down the institutionalized racism of drawing congressional maps along racial lines. The party’s problem is expected to spiral further after the 2030 census, given dramatic population outflows from blue states, driven by governing failures (assuming, that is, the relevant agency doesn’t repeat its disastrous errors of the 2020 count and reapportionment process). Far from having the final say in this battle, Democrats’ bravado and escalations have backfired.
Based on the calculations of GOP pollster and elections analyst Patrick Ruffini, House Republicans may have netted up to 17 seats in the current redistricting tussle. Even if Democrats win a fairly sizable wave this fall, Ruffini concludes, their projected seat gains will be rather limited. Under the old map, if the opposition party won every district Trump carried by nine or fewer percentage points in 2024, they’d end up with a 43-seat majority (239-196).
Under the new map, the same wave would only yield a nine-seat majority (222-213). Democrats are still heavily favored to win back the House, of course, and are in an active and expensive dogfight to also recapture the Senate. But the landscape has shifted, structurally, if not politically. As an aside, I don’t think carving up the country into fewer and fewer competitive districts is healthy for our politics, but Republicans have no incentive to de-escalate, especially after what their opponents attempted in Virginia. I’d be very open to replicating the lines-drawing regime that produced the old/current (very fair and proportional) 6-5 Virginia map, but that cooperative and sensible spirit rests on mutual good faith between the parties, which is understandably in short supply these days. Thus, we now have Democrats muttering about “maximum warfare” on redistricting as they smolder, bewildered, from the catastrophic backfire they helped induce. Picture Wile E. Coyote.
Which brings us back to Spanberger, who is reportedly begging her party leadership to back away from this subject altogether, having been badly singed herself. The New York Times reports that “Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia urged her fellow Democrats, including the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, to stop talking about drawing new congressional lines for partisan advantage.” It’s another 180 from her on this subject, completing the full 360:
Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, whose approval ratings dropped precipitously as she campaigned for her state’s redistricting referendum, is urging her party to drop its quest for partisan advantage in favor of a more pressing issue: winning the midterms. “It is outrageously premature of us to be talking about any sort of redistricting or map changing effort when we have to win the most consequential midterms of my lifetime this November,” Ms. Spanberger said in an interview this week, taking an unsubtle jab at Mr. Jeffries and reflecting broader disquiet among Democrats. … Spanberger said her party’s continued focus on redistricting was a distraction from addressing affordability, President Trump’s leadership and other issues that she said would matter far more to voters this year.
Disarray. If only she’d followed her own advice on this front and maintained her 2025 campaign pledge, perhaps some of this painful chaos could have been avoided by Team Blue. In typical Spanberger fashion, the article says she’s staying noncommittal on taking another bite at the lines-drawing apple ahead of 2028, with a punishing reapportionment of 2030 looming.
Meanwhile, a growing number of angry, power-mad national Democrats are embracing banana republic-style lunacy such as adding states and packing the Supreme Court. It’s as if they cannot fathom such radical measures eventually blowing up in their own faces, as previous short-sighted actions (gerrymandering maximalism and nuking the filibuster on judicial nominations, for instance) infamously have. Will they ever internalize the lesson that their petulant, entitled escalations harm both the country and, inevitably, their own political fortunes?
Or are they determined to keep learning the hard way — gawking, dazed and stunned, at their self-made mess — before mindlessly sprinting toward the next foolish and destructive blunder?